When a loud motorcycle woke up Mark Nesdoly's young daughter, he decided he had enough. Instead of taking a baseball bat to the offending Harley, Nesdoly used his engineering skills to design the Noise Snare, a video detection system for loud vehicles.

The system is simple, yet effective. It uses a microphone to detect excessively loud vehicles and a video camera to record the offender as he or she drives by. Once you have video footage, you can lift an image of the driver, zoom in on his or her license plate, or extract the audio track to prove the person's car or motorcycle is way too loud.

All you need to do is mount the unit on a stationary object and the Noise Snare does the rest. It even connects to a wireless network and sends text messages or emails when a violation is recorded. The detection system works so well that the Canadian city of Calgary may field test the device in the upcoming months. [Gizmag]